shedoesnotcomprehend:

argumate:

mostlysignssomeportents:

Celestine Omin is a Nigerian software engineer who works for Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s company Andela, founded to give talented African coders an entree into the leading American tech firms; this week, he flew to the USA on a B1/B2 visa to meet with the company, but he found himself detained at the border.

The CBP guards who detained Omin after his 24-hour flight were skeptical that he was a real software engineer. They apparently googled “quizzes to give to software engineers” and told him to answer ten questions (e.g. “Write a function to check if a Binary Search Tree is balanced” and “What is an abstract class, and why do you need it?”) to gain entry into the country.

The ordeal ended when a CBP officer called Andela and confirmed that Omin was an engineer.

https://boingboing.net/2017/03/01/what-is-your-favorite-color.html

creeping dystopia, but I gotta say I wish border guards would give me a pop quiz like that, I’d love it and I’d bore them to tears

My dad’s a philosopher and has been quizzed on philosophy by border guards before. And while I haven’t gotten the full-on quiz treatment, I usually get something along the lines of “why are you going to [location?]” “Study abroad.” “Oh, what are you studying?” “Math.” “What kind of math?” “Number theory and combinatorics.” “Cool; have a great day!”

My dad, like me, is about as white as you can get (something like sixth-generation Irish-German Americans), so I’m not at all convinced this is a race thing. I was under the impression it was pretty common, when entering under a visa for a specific purpose, to be asked a couple of pseudo-small-talk questions about it to see if you have suspicious trouble answering or are otherwise Acting Oddly, and occasionally given a more thorough quiz.

Honestly, this seems like a pretty reasonable way of doing something that isn’t racial profiling, while still letting the guards feel like they are Doing Something (and possibly even Actually Doing Something, who knows); someone who’s traveling legitimately won’t have a problem answering “what is an abstract class” or “name a major work of Kant” or the equivalent for their work visa, while someone who isn’t will be lost.

(Of course, you’re going to get some false positives. My dad is amazingly bad at this sort of screening. Once they asked him ‘where are you coming from’ and he couldn’t decide whether to say ‘the US’ or ‘Texas’ and stood there contemplating for an extended period of time. The guards, reasonably enough, found this somewhat suspicious, and he got a pretty extensive grilling before they let him go through.)

I’m having a great time imagining them trying to quiz your father on philosophy. “Oh, you say you’re a philosopher, eh? Well, if you’re really a philosopher, then you’ll be able to explain to me how internal symbols can be grounded in external reality without requiring an infinite regress of mediating mental entities.”

sinesalvatorem:

dragon-in-a-fez:

vashtijoy:

dragon-in-a-fez:

vashtijoy:

dragon-in-a-fez:

dragon-in-a-fez:

hey parents: there is literally no non-abusive reason a person would want the ability to read someone’s emails, track their location, and go through their calls and text messages without their knowledge or consent.

I want to address the person who tagged this “what if they’re missing??”

Google Trusted Contacts.

that’s it, that’s the answer.

what this does is allow you to set up a list of people who are able to request your location. when they do so, you have five minutes to either refuse or grant the request. if you don’t respond within five minutes, the request is automatically accepted, in case you’re hurt or otherwise unable to get to your phone. your trusted contacts can also see how recently you used your device.

in other words: if someone genuinely wants to know if you’re okay, they can check the app and see that you’ve used your phone five minutes ago, and that can be the end of it. if they want to be doubly sure, or it says you haven’t used your phone recently, they can request your location. if you want them to know where you are, or you can’t answer, they’ll have your exact location within five minutes. if you don’t want them to know where you are, you click deny, and they still see that you got the request and responded to it, meaning, again, they know you’re okay. this is safety with accountability: you can’t track someone’s location without their consent unless they fail to respond to the notification, and you can’t do it without them knowing about it.

if you want to track a friend or loved one for genuine safety reasons, set this up. it gives you all the access you need if your concern is actually for the other person’s well-being, rather than a desire for control. (it’s not out for iOS yet, but Google says that’s coming soon).

(also: don’t be the jackass that makes a rule that someone has to accept all your location requests because that makes you just as bad as the people who install tracking shit covertly.)

It’s not abusive in any way for a parent to want to know where their underage child is and who they’re talking to, and saying so is a foul misuse of the term “abuse”.

anyway like I said there is literally no non-abusive reason a person would want the ability to read someone’s emails, track their location, and go through their calls and text messages without their knowledge or consent

I’m glad you live in a world where adults don’t groom kids on the net, or by calling them or sending them text messages.

I live in this world:

a world where parents are an order of magnitude more dangerous to children than “adults grooming them on the internet”, and giving parents unchecked powers of surveillance is for that reason alone more likely to put kids at risk than to keep them safe.

I live in this world:

a world where the psychologically debilitating effects of surveillance are well-established and well-known, yet adults do everything in their power to invade young people’s privacy and then ask dumbass questions like “why are kids so anxious?” and come up with answers like “it’s probably because of selfies”

I live in this world:

a world where invasion of privacy is recognized as an integral part of emotional abuse, but parents still get away with it because “they’re just doing it to keep them safe uwu~”, despite the fact that this is the same line the goddamn NSA gives us and most of us don’t take that sack of lies from them.

tldr, I live in a world where you’re not just wrong, you’re promoting attitudes that are actively harmful and you need to sit down, shut up, and listen when people are trying to educate you about issues of justice and safety.

Slaaaaaay

I remember my first foray into child psychiatry.

My patient was this teenager with a history of behavioral problems. He complained that his family didn’t trust him and monitored everything he did. I sympathized, said that this must be really hard, and that no wonder he was acting out. I had a conversation with the kid and his parents, I told the parents I thought that their overprotectiveness was inappropriate and contributing to their child’s issues, and told them that if they cooperated with him by treating him more maturely, he would cooperate with them by acting more maturely.

A few days later, I called the parents to ask how the son was doing. “We don’t know,” they said. “He disappeared and we haven’t heard from him in days.” Later we learned that he had run off with some people, gone on a multi-day drug binge, and ended up in the hospital.

This was the last time I let my self-righteousness get away from me by lecturing parents on how they were bad people for watching over their kids too closely before I was really sure I knew all the details.

magalis:

eearth:

eearth:

eearth:

Just a reminder that the first NASA astronauts were supposed to be women because generally they are smaller, lighter (less weight in the cockpit means less fuel required) and eat less than men and so would be easier to accommodate in space. 

Both men and women trained (and many of the female finalists had higher scores than the men), but they were completely excluded from the final selection because of their gender.

13 women underwent final training, all were accomplished pilots with at least 1000 hours flying experience, all passed the necessary tests, all could have been astronauts if only they were afforded the opportunity.

[below, Jerrie Cobb photographed during testing]

They are collectively known as the Mercury 13, there’s a great blog entry about them here and a brilliant PBS documentary too.

Their names are Myrtle Cagle, Jerrie Cobb, Janet Dietrich, Marion Dietrich, Wally Funk, Sarah Gorelick, Jane “Janey” Hart, Jean Hixson, Rhea Hurrle, Gene Nora Stumbough, Irene Leverton, Jerri Sloan and Bernice Steadman. They should be remembered and celebrated for their role in the history of space exploration.

It wasn’t until 2 decades later that Sally Ride became the first woman in space in 1983.

7 of the surviving members of the Mercury 13 are pictured below, 33 years later in 1995.

“Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program” by Margaret A. Weitekamp is a really great book about the Mercury 13 if anyone wants to read about them too.

Just a reminder that, like every story of this sort on Tumblr, this is completely false.

The first NASA astronauts were supposed to be men from the beginning. As soon as the astronaut program was started, Eisenhower declared that all astronauts had to be trained military test pilots; at the time, all these pilots were men. No women were ever considered.

After all the (male) Mercury astronauts had been selected, a former NASA consultant no longer affiliated with the organization, Dr. William Lovelace, became curious about how women would do on some of the same astronaut tests. Outside NASA he arranged to have some female aviators privately tested. They did well (though I can’t find any evidence they did “better than the men” and the tests were more about seeing how people’s bodies responded to the stress of space than some kind of competition). Dr. Lovelace publicized his results and Congress held some hearings about whether maybe having only male astronauts was discriminatory. Everyone told Congress that the women involved had no experience flying jet aircraft and no engineering degrees, both of which were requirements for all astronauts. Congress said okay, fine and didn’t take the issue any further.

At no point did any of the women take the official tests, work for NASA, or meet the requirements for NASA training.

raginrayguns:

raginrayguns:

How did thomas jefferson figure out what rights we have? Have we found any new ones since then? Was he wrong about any of the ones he found?

Hmm I’m reading the “Natural and Legal rights” Wikipedia article and it looks like there’s lots of ongoing research and controversy. But there’s no list of the settled, agreed upon ones for which indisputable evidence has been discovered

Oh shit guys actually there’s a UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights! http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ And one of them is not being enslaved, how did Thomas Jefferson miss that one?

Jefferson’s early studies of rights are now known to have been underpowered. If he had just used a larger sample size, none of this would have happened.

dataandphilosophy:

1. It’s about $400 round trip to fly from O’Hare to SFO, and California won’t have waiting periods for abortion any time soon. That’s a longer than average distance to a coastal state that will provide abortion-on-demand. This, while not a trivial expense, is something that the vast majority of American women can recover from. Seriously, get over it. Let the red states ban abortions. We won’t go back to coathangers, we’ll go back to flying places where it’s legal, as one of Jane Roe’s lawyers did during the infamous case. Between Mexico, Canada, Cuba (which is opening up and would love our money) and both coasts, we’re good, seriously. 

2. Roe v. Wade is, in fact, an absurd decision, and there’s a reason that the Court has been walking away from it ever since. Search your Constitution, liberals, you know this to be true.

3. Trump would not have become President if Hillary had been willing to compromise and the base had been willing to accept this.

4. There are other issues that are more important. Around three quarters of a million abortions happened last year, which means we’re looking at something that affects .25% of the population annually. Compare the effort we spend on this to how much it would take to, say, ensure that every woman had access to the moderate sum I mentioned in case of an emergency.

5. “ Several years ago, at Family Research Councils Values Voter Summit, Southern Baptist leader Richard Land said he’d vote for a Jewish pro-life politician who promised to raise his taxes before he’d vote in a Christian pro-choice candidate who promised to cut them.” Joe Carter, web editor of First Things. Seriously, we’d get votes.So many votes. And who are we going to lose, exactly? Say we still believe in being pro-choice, we’re just acknowledging that Roe v. Wade was a bad decision on the grounds of state’s rights (which it is, BTW).

6. Are you at all worried that a competent Republican party might be able to steal Black voters by being, well, religious and not Republicans? This would help.

7. It might, just maybe, help depoliticize SCOTUS. This is more of a “this country would benefit” than a party goal, really, but you got into this to help people, right?

Some of your points make sense, but I really disagree with the “it’s only $400″ one, for a couple of reasons.

Most people live paycheck-to-paycheck. 63% of Americans say they couldn’t handle an emergency $500 bill. I assume people who need abortion are disproportionately in the “can’t afford good contraception” demographic already, so they’re even more unlikely to be able to handle that. And that’s ignoring time taken off work, cost of getting to/from the airport, cost of staying in California once they get there, et cetera.

There are even skills issues. About 20% of Americans have never flown on a plane. Again, people who need abortions (younger, poorer, less educated) are more likely to be in this category than average. Imagine never having flown before and needing to get to California on short notice through a connection in O'Hare.

And I hesitate to use the word “nonfunctional”, because that sounds judgmental, so maybe “non-agentic”? - you have no idea how non-agentic a lot of people are. I will prescribe patients medication, say “If you don’t refill this medication on time in one month, you’ll go into withdrawal and it will be horrible, here’s how you’re going to refill it, here’s all the forms you’ll need, et cetera” - and sure enough, a month later they’re in the emergency room with withdrawal - because they encountered some incredibly minor inconvenience and gave up, or because they just forgot, or because they have some kind of weird learned helplessness where anything other than sitting in their apartment and doing nothing is too hard. Expecting these people to - on their own! without any help! - figure out that abortion is an option, obtain money, buy a flight to California, take the flight to California, get to the abortion clinic, et cetera - and you might as well ask them to build a Mars rocket while you’re at it. And if some charities pop up to help them, then we’re back in the same legal fight about whether states can ban these charities, and the Christians are as angry as ever.

Remember, trivial inconveniences!